First Week of Fall 2011

What's up everyone!

Fall 2011 has kicked off in full force. Classes have started, and it really feels like I'm entering the second year...

University of Waterloo - Uni Ave Entrance © Osama Sidat

This year, I've got MATH 237, ACTSC 231, STAT 231, AFM 101 & CS 136... I didn't want to have an excess of math courses, so limited them to three, and took the latter two as hopefully useful electives...

MATH 237: Calculus, something to do with multiple variables. Professor Kohandel seems to be okay, the first lecture was a bit fragmented, but subsequent lectures were better off. Time will tell how we fare in this course...

ACTSC 231: Mathematics of Finance, related to the SOA FM Exam (that is next up on my list of actuarial papers). I expected this course to be more exciting, but Professor Freeland just goes on and on and on... and the examples are rather bland. Oh well, I guess will have to turn to the text for this one...

STAT 231: Intro to Stats. Stats can be dry, but when a prof just reads of the slides, that are actually provided as course notes, it becomes really lame. Right now, there's kid stuff like pie charts and histograms, but there's bound to be some challenging stuff further down into the course...

STAT 231 © Osama Sidat

AFM 101: Financial Accounting. Prof Duane Kennedy is pretty good. So far, I'm enjoying the course. I rarely read up course material before class, but this class is one instance where I did, 'cuz it was interesting and pretty clear. Really hope to make this course count...

Professor Kennedy © Osama Sidat

CS 136: Elementary Algorithm Design & Data Abstraction. Am I crazy for taking this course since I'm not a CS major? Maybe! Despite that the assignment problems can induce strings of curse words, I find programming to be fun and challenging. Gordon Cormack teaches in a nice, slow kind of a way, which makes it easy to connect the dots...

Well, this is kinda it. My course rundown...

I've been accepted as a Teaching Assistant for Math. Gonna be marking first year quizzes/assignments!

Thursday Night: Turned up Larry Smith's ECON 101! As usual, it was awesome!

Cooked up my tuna & spaghetti dinner yesterday, this time included a few additions from here. Turned out pretty good!

Spaghetti with Tuna Sauce © Osama Sidat

Roamed around for a bit in the University today. Wanted to take photos of the new Mathematics building, the M3. It's pretty neat, and for a change, it has lots of windows and sunlight (unlike the MC, affectionately known to Mathies as the "jail-house").

Mathematics 3 - New Home of ActSci & Stats Depts © Osama Sidat

More photos from around UW (all shot today) can be found in my Facebook Album.

Looking forward to UWPC meetings... I just hope I can fit 'em around my schedule; might be easier this time, since no late evening classes...

So, that's it for this week. Lets see when the next post rolls around...

Until next time...

Good Night (or Day)